Five Reasons I Like Charles Alexander's _Pushing Water_

1. It is not a LONG long poem – it is 213 pages, as opposed to, say, 800. It is that rarest of animals: a non-arrogant long poem by a male writer. He manages to be serious (even representing his own experience -- !) without being sententious. There is a questioning, open observing that is confident without being overbearing. Sometimes this stance results in humor:

begin again

to undo

the beginning

not a fugue

but a fudge

This is not “A” – that seemingly interminable “fugue” – it is a poem that begins again and again, sometimes muddling along, that makes modest claims for itself: “the colloquial uncertainty / as always.”

2. Pushing Water flows. That is, through a combination of headlong syntax and cascading enjambments, this poem MOVES like few others. If Stein disliked commas, Alexander dislikes (or doesn’t believe in) periods:

and air lives (with a short

vowel) and air lives (with a

long vowel) we are all

shortened and elongated

according to our wishes and

desires in a changed but not

yet ended world or arena of

. . . and of course it goes on – that’s part of the point – the ongoingness of things – the flow of air, water, life, thought. The air lives short, lives are short, vowels live as and in air. We are all long vowels, changed but not yet ended. We’re pushing with and against the water at once.

3. There is a delightful variety in the form – which is open form (unreproducible by a technical idiot, in a program like Blogger), using the vertical space of the page via line-length, indentation, spacing (vertical and horizontal). Sometimes in stanzas (numbered, even), sometimes in run-on double-spaced sections. And the form rarely seems unmotivated. The verse usually revolves back to itself, using the form as poetics:

they come     to come

by the water in a place

that invents every thing

again                     a new line

4. The book contains memorable passages like the ones above that, nonetheless, do not overwhelm the rest of the writing. Neat trick. There are lines like this: “When she wrote her life why didn’t she leave it alone?” – that seem to be just another point along the way, but end up saying more than they seem to say. Alexander is “remaining ever in the company of small / words like of and around” – lively words and lines that aren’t weighted down by nouns.

5. I just keep coming back to it. It’s playful without the deadly serious playfulness of some American ironists. Maybe Pushing Water reminds me a bit of Larry Eigner – not so much in form as in tone. I like typing out the lines:

the words are distant, abstract, bloodless,

except for the singing of the lullaby tonight

after the poem my daughter came

and asked for a lullaby – the poem ends and the lullaby begins

or the poem never ends, the war never ends, the lullaby never ends

the light goes into the air

the water goes into the light and the air

I ask my friends where the words end

they don’t have the same answers that I don’t have

they don’t have the same questions that I don’t have

in all the places I have been

in the words have gone

they all are taken

the water pushes as far as it can

the light is out

tonight

the light is out